How to Maintain Your WordPress Website: Step By Step Guide for Beginners‍

Keeping your website up-to-date with the latest features and functionality is challenging, especially if you’re an independent business owner or sole operator with limited time and resources. With so many details to manage, it’s easy for a website to fall out of date. Many WordPress website owners neglect their websites because it’s overwhelming to keep track of all the changes and new versions coming out constantly. Fortunately, there are simple steps you can take to manage the constant evolution of WordPress CMS. This article will show you how by explaining some best practices for managing updates and keeping your site secure.

Back up your website regularly

WordPress has implemented several features that help to ensure your site’s data is secure, but you should still keep an off-site backup. A regular backup will protect you in the event of a hack or data breach that affects your website. It is also useful if you want to change hosting providers. Your best bet is to use a service that stores your data off-site, such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud, or a service like BackBlaze, which has a fully managed secure off-site solution. Alternatively, your website host can provide an off-site backup service.

Don’t skimp on security

This is crucial as it dictates whether your website is secure or not. To keep your website secure, WordPress has implemented certain measures that you need to be aware of. They use SSL, TLS, and certificates to secure your website. It is important to keep up-to-date with the most recent versions to prevent malicious attacks and cybercriminals from gaining access to your website.

Keep track of new features and functions

WordPress continues to release new versions with new features and functions. You must be aware of these changes so that you can decide whether or not you should implement them on your website. Keep track of the new versions by reviewing the release notes. The release notes are published by the development team and list the new features and functions included in the latest version. It’s important to note that the release notes are just a summary of what’s new in the latest version. They don’t go into detail about the new changes. You can find more detailed information by searching online or asking your host or web developer.

Update when there’s a critical update

Keeping your site secure is very important, but you should also be mindful of the frequency of updates since updating too frequently can lead to performance issues. You should only update when there’s a critical update that you need to prevent critical issues or vulnerabilities from affecting your site. To find out if an update is critical, you can look at the release notes or read the release notes from an article or blog post from an expert.

Conclusion

Keeping your website up-to-date is critical to the success of your business, but doing so can be challenging as you have to balance feature upgrades with security updates. Fortunately, there are a few simple steps you can take to manage the constant evolution of WordPress and keep your website secure and up-to-date. However if you prefer, you can get managed WordPress maintenance for a low monthly price.